Feds plan tougher rules for oil well blowout preventers

WASHINGTON – Obama administration officials on Tuesday outlined plans for new rules designed to boost the reliability and power of emergency equipment safeguarding offshore wells, two years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster revealed shortcomings in the devices.

The coming mandates, set to be proposed by September, focus on the hulking blowout preventers that sit atop the wellhead and are a last line of defense against surging oil and gas. During an emergency, shearing and sealing rams in the devices can be activated to cut drill pipe and block off the well hole.

But a forensic examination of the blowout preventer unearthed from BP’s failed Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico revealed that the device was unable to slash through a piece of drill pipe that had buckled and been pushed off center.

The investigations of the blowout preventer at the Macondo well revealed ''some serious issues’' that are not unique to BP’s operation, Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes said at a government forum meant to help regulators craft the new mandates.

Hayes signaled the rule would require stricter maintenance of blowout preventers, stronger training for the people operating them and ''better sensors to tell us what is happening at the bottom of the sea.''

Fundamentally, Hayes said, ''BOPs need to be able to cut whatever is in their way and completely seal off the well.''

That could mean a big redesign for the devices that have been used to safeguard onshore and subsea wells since they were first created in the 1920s. For instance, blowout preventers today are not generally capable of shearing tool joints, the thick connections between pieces of drill pipe, although GE Oil and Gas and other manufacturers are rolling out new designs that promise that capability.

''The industry responds to forensic information that is given to us,'' said Chuck Chauviere, GE Oil and Gas’ general manager of drilling. ''We are improving what the capabilities of the equipment are.''

Roger McCarthy, a member of the National Academy of Engineering panel that probed the Deepwater Horizon disaster, said ''the industry had plenty of warnings’' before the 2010 oil spill that blowout preventers had problems shearing even under ''benign conditions.''

A new blowout preventer rule should ensure the devices would at least have been able to halt the gushing oil and gas at Macondo, he said.

''We don’t want to fight the last war,'' McCarthy said. ''But let’s remember, we lost the last war. So, at a minimum, we should be able to anticipate with our current design recommendations and incorporate in them all the history we have paid so dearly for by not being prepared for the last disasters.''

A BOP has got to be powerful enough ''to cut anything that’s in front of it when all hell is breaking loose,'' McCarthy added.

Industry representatives pleaded with federal regulators to include specific performance standards in any new rule while leaving enough room for innovation to meet those requirements.

''Tell us what you want and let us figure out how we do it,'' said Moe Plaisance, the vice president of governmental and industry affairs for the drilling contractor Diamond Offshore. ''We want to be part of the solution.''

A push for more data from the devices was borne out of the initial response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, when engineers struggled to remotely trigger the blowout preventer at the Macondo well and ascertain whether its rams had fully closed.

Tom Hunter, the former president of Sandia National Laboratories and the head of the federal government’s scientific team working with BP to respond to the spill, said it was frustrating not to be able to learn basic information about the status of the Macondo well and the blowout preventer.

Hunter said unanswered questions included what – if anything – was inside the wellbore, pressures inside the preventer, whether all controls were hooked up and whether the device was stable.

''I can’t tell you how difficult, if not impossible, it was to find any of that out,'' Hunter said.

''We spent countless hours trying to understand what was happening with this system and never had anything more than guesses,'' Hunter added. ''It was not a self-revealing system. It was very hard to understand, and the data we needed to do a response was not available.''

Hunter said the next generation of blowout preventers should be designed with transparency in mind. Ideally, workers should be able to quickly get temperature readings, flow information and other data from the blowout preventers working thousands of feet below the surface of the sea.

''It should be clear what is going on,'' he said. ''All the elements should be fully diagnosable, and all of the internals should be observable in some way.''

James Watson, director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, said the agency would be considering a phase-in period as part of any new rule to allow time for manufacturers to redesign the devices to meet new standards and to get the equipment to the marketplace.

Although much of the rule will focus on blowout preventers used in challenging deep-water conditions, Watson said some mandates would apply to shallow-water drilling as well.

New blowout preventer rules will build on testing and certification requirements that were imposed after the 2010 spill.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters that new blowout preventer standards will ensure ''we are exploring and developing our oil and gas resources in America’s oceans in a safe and responsible way,'' while raising the bar for drilling operations around the globe.

''This rule will basically set the standards for the world,'' he said.

One possible requirement, mentioned by Salazar, would be a requirement for a second set of blind shear rams to improve the odds of successfully cutting through drill pipe (and avoiding thicker, harder-to-penetrate tool joints where pipes are connected).

BP is already using a second set of blind shear rams on the blowout preventers it uses to guard wells in the Gulf of Mexico. And Shell Oil Co. has pledged to use two rams on BOPs for exploratory drilling it hopes to launch in the Arctic Chukchi and Beaufort seas this summer.

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